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Leadership & Governance Work Group

As a part of the year and a half long work of the most recent Bylaws Committee, that committee recommended an alteration to the Bylaws that would eliminate the office of President-Elect. There were several rationales for this recommendation. First, with the Supreme Court ruling in Telli v. Snipes, upholding term limits for chartered county commissioners, there was concern that not enough time would exist for commissioners to become experienced and well qualified within the Association before they would be termed out of office and thus ineligible to hold office. In addition, because of general election pressures, outside term limits, the committee wanted to mirror the NACo model and allow officers, once elected to the 2nd VP officer a shorter time to ascend to the presidency. In November, the Executive Committee directed staff to remove the President-Elect elimination office from the list of recommendations to be presented to the full membership in June 2013 and directed staff to continue to work with the Executive Committee on that particular issue.

Since the late fall of 2012, the impact of term limits and other election pressures has continued to generate concern among the Association members. Furthermore, with the addition of Miami-Dade County as a term limited county, the total in the state is now 11 counties with term limits, all of them large urban or medium sized counties. The outcome of this fact is the potential for unbalance among the leadership of the Association in a relatively short period of time.

In addition to this leadership issue, Association members have discussed the need for examining the Association’s provision of direct services on a regional basis within the state. While the strategic plan for the Association is not due for update for another few years, this issue is one on which the Executive Committee wanted some guidance.

Accordingly, at the end of December, President Bryan Desloge appointed a work group to comprehensively examine these two issues: (1) the Association’s officer elections, including but not limited to, the number of offices, the eligibility requirements for office, and the voting procedures for offices; and (2) the Association’s direct services delivery on a regional level. The Work Group will be prepared to present its findings and recommendations to the Executive Committee at the Annual Conference in June 2013. The deliberation by this Work Group is critical to the health and future of the Association, and, accordingly the Work Group will conduct most of its meetings in person, rather than by conference call.

President Desloge created the following composition of the FAC Leadership and Governance Work Group: all current past presidents who remain in office and are from a county in good standing (J. Manning (Lee), S. Latvala (Pinellas), T. Jacobs (Orange), D. Smith (Martin), W. Cadwell (Lake)), and one commissioner from a small (Warren Yaeger – Gulf), one from a medium (Paula Lewis – St. Lucie) and one from a large county (Shelley Vana – Palm Beach), for a total of eight members. Ginger Delegal will be the primary staff person assigned to the Work Group.